Zahar

Zahar traces back to the Hebrew name Zekharyah, which English renders as god has remembered. In Russia and Ukraine the form settled as Zahar, a boy's name tied to the biblical prophet Zechariah. The Hebrew root joins a verb for remembering with the divine name, so the sense reads as a small promise: a birth that answered a plea spoken long before.

The Russian novelist Zakhar Prilepin carries a close variant of it, which keeps the name in newspaper columns and not only in old church calendars.

For a Polish family the name reads as plainly foreign, eastern and Orthodox in flavor. On a class register in Wrocław it would stand out among the Kacpers and Szymons. Its meaning, though, needs no unpacking once said aloud. Bóg pamięta, god has remembered, is a phrase a parent can hold.

The name stays close to its source. No Polish diminutive has grown around it, no softened home form. What you have is Zahar, and behind it the Hebrew word for remembering.